Add dentists to Millennials' list of victims

Diamonds. Napkins. Marriage. Relationships. Fashion. All are being killed by Millennials. Now it's the dental industry's turn.

 Millennials don't visit the dentist - at least not at the rates that their sweet and adorable younger siblings do, or at the rate of their responsible and sensible parents.

Now some Millennial reading this might start whining and complaining and making feeble excuses. "My employer doesn't offer dental insurance." "Other generations didn't visit the dentist when they were young." "I floss daily, have great teeth, and don't need to go." "I've got a crippling load of student debt, and can barely afford to pay the rent, let alone get a dental check-up." 

Seriously? Let's take apart that student debt thing. What about those poor dentists? Dental tuition in Canada currently averages $21,012 a year. How will young dentists pay off their hundreds of thousands in student loans if other Millennials don't use their services?

Nope, it's time for the Millennials to smarten up, find themselves good jobs with benefits, and end the carnage before it's too late.

Update: here are the 2013/14 numbers beside the 2003 ones. This says more about who has steady jobs with benefits than anything else.

 

 

 

Comments

[Neil]

I'm confused. "Other generations didn't go at this age" is a legitimate criticism of a chart that shows a comparison by age rather than a single age group over time, no?

[Frances Woolley]

Neil, yes, of course it is. That's a general problem with the "Millennials are killing" genre. All the others are legitimate criticisms too.

[Yildo]

/s tag for the benefit of readers from /r/canada on Reddit.

[Hopla hopeless]

Hey author. I feel like you forgot a huge stat. Only 14% of jobs offer dental coverage and only 5% get access before the one year Mark. Not to mention the cost of living increase with no increases to wage because your generation are greedy. Don't put this on us. You are the ones holding us down. Using your graph note after 18 it drops. 18 being the last year most insurance companies will cover your kids till. Note again the increase for the age 35+. Your graph is all the proof you need to ruin your article but you keep wearing those glasses called ignorance which blind you from reality.

[Neil]

Got it. The problem with satire is that it's basically indistinguishable from the real thing.

[Yildo]

For what it's worth, I tremendously enjoyed this post and found the skewering humour top notch.

[Frances Woolley]

Yildo - thanks!

Neil - Ii've been writing about the dental industry all week. Finding out things like 80% of single self-employed people in Canada have no dental insurance. That having insurance has a big effect on the probability of going to the dentist, even for people in the top decile of the household income distribution. But, yes, things are easily misunderstood without all of the background info on how the dental industry works to give it context.

[Evan]

My experience with dental insurance in Canada is that it isn't actually insurance at all (at least not in the sense that economists use the term). It's really more of a pre-payment plan. The main problem being that the "insurance" plans have such a low annual spending limit that they would be next to useless if faced with the need for major work.

So I'd reformulate Frances' observation to be that people who have pre-paid dental checkups tend to use them.

[Jacques René Giguère]

They are indeed next to useless. I know by experience.
And a few years back, I submitted invoices for expensive but covered procedures. They refused by misclassifying them. A year later, I received a letter of apologies about the "mistake". The letter ended by "However, due to expired delays, it is not possible to pay your claims."

[Frances Woolley]

Evan - yup, that's exactly right. In fact the plans are structured exactly how you'd expect them to be structured if they were simply a form of untaxed compensation - instead of paying people $200 per year in (taxable) income, pay people $200 per year in (not taxable) routine dental care.

In Canada the typical employer-sponsored plan has premiums 100% paid by the employer, which means the dental plan is an untaxed benefit. (Though at Carleton the employee pays a fraction of the extended health benefits, which means we're paying them out of after-tax income, which is highly inefficient from a tax point of view, and probably tells you something about the history of collective bargaining here over the years).

[Frances Woolley]

Jacques Rene, sorry to hear about that experience. It's all too common, I'm afraid.